Royals

The Queen Has Four Cocktails a Day, but Not at the Times You Might Expect

Queen Elizabeth II toasts to French President Hollande during a State Banquet in 2014.

By Anwar Hussein/WireImage.

The Queen, it would seem to us, more than essentially anyone else on the planet, deserves to be able to eat and drink and behave absolutely however she wants. If she wanted to jump on a trampoline from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day while the Friends theme song played, and wanted to eat sushi with a side of sliced American cheese for every meal, we would just smile, nod our heads, and ask what size trampoline she wants and what brand of American cheese she prefers.

The monarch of more than six decades does, in fact, have quite peculiar and specific dietary preferences. We learned not too long ago that the Queen has a favorite kind of cake—which is made by her Buckingham Palace chefs—that she has a slice of every single day.

And Food and Wineuncovered another detail about the Queen’s daily intake: the 91-year-old reportedly consumes four cocktails a day. And why shouldn’t she!? Let’s run through what they are:

Her first drink, per former royal chef Darren McGrady, enjoyed shortly before lunch, is a gin and Dubonnet with a slice of lemon and a “lot of ice.” Sure, this sounds about right. A classy and posh and powerful concoction.

Then, during lunch, she’ll have a piece of chocolate and a glass of wine at meal’s end. (That we have been eating lunch all these years without closing with a piece of chocolate and glass of wine now makes us feel utterly foolish.)

O.K., then, also at lunch, the Queen drinks a dry gin martini, according to her cousin Margaret Rhodes. So, yes, we are now at three drinks by roughly 1 p.m.

Her final drink of the day? It actually doesn’t come until she’s going to sleep: a glass of Champagne before bed.

The way her four drinks are spaced out throughout the day is not really how we would have anticipated it, but maybe—likely—the Queen knows something we don’t. Three drinks before the end of lunch . . . and then a break until bedtime: the key to success and longevity and happiness? Perhaps the Queen is really onto something. If she didn’t already have enough on her plate, we would be encouraging her right now to start a Goop or Draper James of her own; we can only imagine what other sort of lifestyle-related tips she must have to share.